Fish Food

So we are almost now fully certified PADI open water divers. We made it through our written test with flying colours and have done all of contained dives and the first two open water dives today. The overall experience has been a little surreal. I figured it would be scarier to get used to breathing underwater but, at least for me, it wasn’t actually that bad. The hardest thing of the scuba experience has been the fact that I have basically been fish bait the entire time. I have a couple of cuts on my legs and the fish have decided to be good global citizens making sure that the cuts are all good and clean of any dead skin. Although this may be healthy it does sting a little bit when they bite and it’s rather distracting. There really is nothing worse than trying to do emergency procedures underwater while getting nipped by fish. The upside, not necessarily for me but for everyone else, is we got to see a ton of fish as they ate away at me. I think by far my most memorable moment for the whole diving experience happened during the first dive about 5 minutes in. We were sitting on the bottom getting used to actually breathing underwater when a school of 10 brightly coloured orange fish swam right in front of my mask and scared the crap out of me. After that everything has just been gravy.

The one downside to all of this diving has been that although we are on this awesome island we haven’t really had any time to go around and explore it. We’ve started our last couple days at 8am (tomorrow starts at 7) and they’ve been finishing at 5pm leaving us very hungry and ready for early beds. I would love at least a day to actually go around and explore but sadly we need to catch the 3pm ferry out of here tomorrow. Oh well, this is one of the downsides of traveling I suppose sooner or later you just have to move on. It’s a tough life.

We are now officially two weeks into the trip and although it doesn’t feel like time has flown by it also doesn’t feel like it’s been that long; perhaps it has something to do with all of the rain. I will say though today was a full day of sun and it was absolutely wonderful. To actually be sitting on a bar at the beach during sunset was unforgettable.

The country breakdown of people we have run into thus far has been rather amusing. The largest group of people by far has been Canadians (easily over 200 thus far). We have actually even managed to run into 4 people we know from home on this journey. The second major group of people I would say is probably English. This is always interesting for Mike and me as we have determined that we watch more British TV than the Brits we’ve met. After that we’ve had a random smattering of Scandinavians, Irish, and Iranian. My biggest surprise thus far is that we have actually only run into one American and just yesterday. It has also been great because no one has automatically assumed we are American by our accents, they think Canadian first by far. The downside to all of the English though is that I’ve started to accidentally develop a bit of a bad accent from hanging out with so many of them.

That’s all I have for now, nothing really exciting as we have been diving for the last 2 days and haven’t had time for much else. That isn’t to say that diving hasn’t been exciting, today was crazy cool as we went down to 12m deep and swam around for 34 and then 40 minutes respectively, but it is just hard to find words for an experience this new. After a couple days of reflection I might be able to properly frame it.